Our society is the subject of many restrictive measures. Some are very old, like the age-threshold for pornography, others are slightly younger. Under them, the restricted selling of alcohol, tobacco and cannabis to kids under 16 or 18.
Yesterday I saw, for the first time in my life, a video game for adults, although selling it to minors would not be restricted in any way. It was a very, very violent game, where the objective was to kill as many people as possible in as many ways as are conceivable. I have seldom seen such stomach twisting graphics and it made me wonder what the rules actually were, concerning this kind of rubbish.
It is thoroughly researched by now that violent games and films have a devastating impact on young children. (Was it, actually..?) Nevertheless, not many parents, or better said, not the majority of the parents I know, monitor what their offspring is watching on their private bedroom TV sets and their Internet terminals. That is in any case the impression I get from observations I made in my environment.
Most parents will have some rough ideas as to what is desirable or not. So mothers might have an opinion on their sons watching titties and front-bums for their pleasure. But that seems more or less to be the extent of it. They are, however, a lot more liberal when it comes to violence, an integral part of many video games available for kids under 18. And those kids are not always able to understand the differences between the game and real life. But there is more…
One of the main problems in our life, as I see it, is the constant bombardment by commercials that we, as citizens minding our own business, get to see whenever we switch on a TV, browse the Web, drive past a billboard or open a magazine. It happens everywhere. And it happens to our kids too. Here, the same principle applies: they not always have a clue as to the difference between real life and the nonsense they see in commercials.
It is already driving young girls into their deaths, because they feel that they cannot comply to the image of slimness and beauty, which the media are bouncing of at them all the time. We also saw in Columbine how lethal a mix of low self esteem, graphical violence and a powerful commercial lobby can be.
The examples might be extreme, but we can assume that any targeted message will hit its projected goal and have its required effects. Those marketing people are very good at what they are doing, and I have no reason to think that they are working in a vacuum, spending their accounts’ money on ineffective communication. And kids are a HUGE market, with real money to spend.
Consumption of unnecessary stuff that has an unacceptable large ecological footprint, images of “ideal” bodies that are unobtainable, pushing depressions on our kids, standards of violence that should be eradicated from society…; these are problems we must somehow tackle on a short notice. We see teenagers killing one another in London, we see courtesy disappearing from public life, because public figures in the media are making a living by putting others down. We are slowly – or maybe even faster than I think – culturally deteriorating as a species. Call me pessimistic, but are we worth preserving?
I look at my kids and I think the answer to the question above is still yes. But it will require me to protect them from the bullshit-bombardment they potentially get every day. I must raise them as revolutionaries, that is their only shot at becoming independent, well behaved adults, who can stand their ground in life. Revolutionaries, against the unrestricted consumerism, divertionism, violence and lack of courtesy & tolerance. I do hope that I stand a chance in that, too.
